Deadline reports that the part, which was going to be played by Gal Gadot until her Wonder Woman commitments got in the way, will now be played by Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-British actress who currently co-stars on the TV series Homeland.

Deadline reports that other actresses who were up for the part included: Sofia Boutella, who is Algerian; Moran Atias, who is Israeli; and Natalia Warner, about whose background I currently know nothing.

Boniadi made the news a few years ago when Vanity Fair reported that she briefly dated Tom Cruise between November 2004 and January 2005, after the Church of Scientology conducted some sort of “wife-auditioning process” for him. She no longer belongs to the Church.

Life was too busy to post a box-office update last week, but that’s okay, I think, since not a lot was happening then.

The big story this week is that Transformers: Age of Extinction supposedly became the first film of the year to gross over $100 million in a single weekend (in North America, that is) — but that figure was quickly disputed by rival studios, who said the film actually came in just a tiny bit beneath that amount. Whatever. It was still pretty huge.

Depending on how you look at it, Edge of Tomorrow either “won” or “lost” at the box office this past weekend.

That’s right, you can actually argue that Edge of Tomorrow “won”. Most reports have focused on the fact that the $28.8 million that the film opened to in North America last weekend fell well behind the $48 million that the low-budget romance The Fault in Our Stars opened to, and it even fell a bit behind the $34.3 million that Maleficent earned in its second week. But Edge of Tomorrow actually won the weekend overseas and thus worldwide.